Brilliant

Print any image on your fingernails

So where is your favorite place to chat with geeks (male and females) Most free services don’t experience many geek visitors, so I find it tough to communicate. DALnet is good - where else exists out there? What about Mac-centric chats?

I had made a smart play list that chose one hour of music at random, to make my hikes a little more interesting. This way, I don’t have to check a watch. I never could figure out how to get iTunes to choose a new set of songs though.

I figured it out by accident tonight. Select the songs in the playlist and press delete. It will delete the songs and then fill the playlist again.

This is not intuitive to me because as an engineer, I see an auto playlist as something that is mutable. You should not be able to edit the list (the computer created it after all!) so I never tried. Bad UI, but I guess we learn how to work around kludgy UI all of the time.

I feel, so, Windows like…

P.S. I would have preferred a “Randomize again” or “rebuild playlist” option in the playlist’s contextual menu.

They just raised my bill from $46 a month to $56. Over 20%! Oh but if I sign up for cable TV, they will drop it $10. For a year. Lamers.

Update: I just purchased my first song. I had to quit iTunes and relaunch. I guess it got confused in the ragged launch morass. The song downloaded quickly and when I updated the iPod, it synced fine!

It has been 3 hours since Apple’s iTunes service went live. I can finally get into the store via iTunes, but i can’t buy anything yet due to:

“could not purchase “” because there was an error, Please try again later”

Oh well. I somehow lost my iTunes library in the HD failure from Hell in March. I was able to copy all of my songs off of the iPod using terminal, but I lost my playlists. No biggie.

A new feature is that when you re-rip a CD, it will see if you have already ripped that song and let you replace it inline. This is cool, but it fails if you changed a track name. Unfortunately, this is exactly what i have been doing, as a lot of of the CDDB titles are “artist/title” or “title - artist” which sucks on the iPod. Oh well. I guess I will have to write a utility to scan the XML export and find duplicates some other way, then send that code to Apple

Once I can buy some songs (got Dead Man’s Party on the list) I will let you know how it works.

Sigh. Everyone wants to watch or listen to this Apple Music announcement but we’re relegated to reloading an overload MacCentral website.

Apple, do you have a clue anymore? Why shut out your audience, the people who will BUY your services and products?

“Look, there is my foot! Shoot it!”

Update: How sad, I have to watch an Apple event on MSN using Windows Media Player.

I wrote my first SmallTalk class this week. I am working in Squeak to assess it for a project I am consulting on. The system is quite amazing and much to wrap my mind around, quickly. These guys are in a league of their own - I’m aiming to contribute.

The paradigm shift is large, but I now see how, in some ways, ScriptX and Objective-C have derived from SmallTalk. The performance is good and now thanks to OS X, a lot of the memory issues just disappear.

There are hurdles and much to learn, but for once I am excited about programming again. The combination of late binding, powerful tools, flexible systems and just enough rope to hang myself are an exciting, intoxicating cocktail.

I am not a huge fan of The Hulk but the special effects look great!

Watch the trailer

Welcome, Pink Panther

Aladdin releases a new Stuffit Expander, and I have to go through Digital River and submit all this info, make a password, just to download a free bug fix?

Can you say junk info? What a waste of resources just to try and scam off some additional product sales.

Update: Aladdin did have an FTP link. Still is annoying that the first link puts users through all of that mess.

This guy built a 28% scale mech for his kids. Very cool!

I have not been reading Macintouch over the last 6 months or so, because I have switched to reading my news via NetNewsWire, an RSS reader.

Well now, Macintouch supports RSS! The url for your RSS newsreader is:

http://www.macintouch.com/rss.xml

Gone 48 hours, 157 spam, 23 legit emails.

Talk about a waste of bandwidth.

Chef Mayhem of Doombuggies.com fame has put up a Pirates of the Caribbean site!

This man is truly a hero of mine.

Slavercise

That’s the way uh huh uh huh I like it uh huh uh huh

The Philips iPronto is the latest in home entertainment gadgets that also crosses the information appliance boundaries.

At $1700, it is too expensive and the thing is so large, it is useless for “couch potatoes” like myself. Not being a general purpose computer, I can’t chat on it using my computer’s address book. I can’t check the mail on my computer either.

What is more interesting to me is the rumored Apple tablet that is really a remote screen for a desktop. If this is done right, I might be buying that new 970 desktop with one of these puppies.

Now I don’t know what Apple’s “tablet” will entail, but this is what I want:

1) Fast enough to not notice I am using a wireless screen 2) Docks into a DVI connector so I can sit at my desk and have the keyboard/mouse activate. This is important, because if I walk away with my tablet and someone bumps my mouse in the office, I don’t want it moving my cursor 3) Flip up screen, exposing keyboard, so it works like a normal laptop 4) Industry quality IR port (not lame computer type) so I can do pronto-like features on it 5) touch screen that supports inkwell 6) several hour battery life, with a second charger included for charging in the living room 7) 1152×768 screen

We’ll see what the future brings

A month ago my IBM Travelstar 48GB drive died and I sent it in to Hitachi early this month. I checked the RMA on their site and it shows as having shipped on 4/4/2003.

I left town on the 10th, with no drive here and returned on the 15th. There was no UPS note, no drive. I was freakin out, thinking someone had stolen it.

I called Hitachi and they said, “That date is the shipment from overseas to us, your drive shipped yesterday, will be there tomorrow.”

Doh! If they had put that on the RMA status page they would have saved themselves a support call.

I think I would ride Apple until they repaired my screen, because this is silly.

The winner of the “wow that is one poorly designed MP3 player” award goes to:

Archos